Kamala Harris: Will she give Biden’s campaign a boost?
“The process was long and winding,” said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post, but Joe Biden finally got it right last week in picking Sen. Kamala Harris to be his 2020 running mate. It’s not just that Harris, 55, a five-term congresswoman and former attorney general of California, is eminently qualified to serve as president if the 77-year-old Biden doesn’t complete a full term or steps down after one. Harris’ gender and ethnicity—as the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, she’s the first woman of color on a major-party ticket—will invigorate Biden-skeptical progressives, while her own pragmatic, moderate credentials should soothe the “ideological anxiety” of mainstream voters worried Biden might be a Trojan horse for the radical Left. Harris is also a battle-tested national campaigner, said Bart Jansen in USA Today. Biden learned firsthand how this former prosecutor can land a punch on the debate stage when she went after him on his opposition in the 1970s to school busing. Harris’ Senate grillings of Jeff Sessions, Brett Kavanaugh, and William Barr, meanwhile, are “the stuff of Democratic legend.” If she “brings that same fire” to the Democratic ticket, in particular to her debate with the ever-evasive Mike Pence, Biden’s safe-but-inspired choice of running mate could well be decisive in November.
If Harris is a good campaigner, said Matt Purple in TheAmerican Conservative.com, why did her own campaign go so “horribly wrong?” She entered the race in January 2019 as Biden’s most viable challenger, polling a healthy 15 percent in the 24-candidate field. By December, though, she was at 4 percent, thanks to incoherent, shifting positions on Medicare for All and police reform, and generally having proved herself “too liberal for the moderates and not liberal enough for the Left.” Harris’ “legendary” verbal-combat skills are also wildly overrated, said Noah Rothman in CommentaryMagazine.com. Just consider her interrogation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Democrats still swoon over the supposedly “masterful moment” when Harris asked a bewildered Kavanaugh about his secret contacts with “the Kasowitz law firm,” which represented Donald Trump. Kavanaugh denied it, and Harris dropped the matter. As we also saw in the debates, Harris throws lots of punches, but it’s all for effect. She “has no follow-through.”
Nor is she any kind of moderate, said Kyle Smith in National Review.com. Harris has long advocated single-payer health care and says illegal immigrants should be covered by it for free. She’s also fully on board with the socialistic Green New Deal and would happily “destroy the filibuster” and expand and pack the Supreme Court to get it passed. At the same time, Harris doesn’t excite many people on the Left, said Tiana Lowe in WashingtonExaminer. They’re well aware that as California’s attorney general, Harris aggressively prosecuted nonviolent drug crime and used prisoners to fight wildfires for $1 a day.
Actually, Biden’s choice of Harris was a smart tactical move, said Manisha Sinha in The New York Times, and to an Indian-American woman like me, it feels like a “personal gift.” After eight years of the Obama presidency, the open racism and anti-immigrant animus Trump brought to the White House has been deeply alarming to all people of color. The charismatic Harris “represents the very groups mocked and vilified by Trump —women, Black people and immigrants”—and will energize those voters. At the same time, a Biden-Harris ticket represents “the cosmopolitan, interracial democracy that a majority of Americans aspire to live in today.”